About TNW

TNW Sites

Helicopter search engine + hotel search engine =

A helicopter search engine? Of course. When we say that there is a search engine for anything that you can think of, we mean it.

HeliHub claims to be the one-stop site for information about helicopters, and I have no reason to doubt them. After all, it’s the only helicopter search engine that I know of, and the site averages over 71 posts a week! HeliHub filters all that information in four ways: By the model type, by accidents involving that model, by country, and by accidents in each country. Apparently there are a lot of accidents… Started one year ago in the US, HeliHub has just been acquired by Jeremy Parkin, and is now based in the UK.

But it gets better. There is also a good hotel search engine I want to tell you about –hotelicopter. Yes, that’s spelled correctly: hotel-i-copter. When you need to book a hotel room, hotelicopter goes out, in real time, and searches over 30 online travel sites. They then collate that information and bring it back to you in neatly formatted search results. If you want to book a room, you can do it right then and there. You could call hotelicopter a sub-sub-vertical search engine, like so: Travel Search > Lodging > Hotels. And yes, there are sub-sub-sub engines! UnusualHotelsOfTheWorld only searches for unique and unusual hotels. Little known fact: hotelicopter is the only search engine based in my town – Charlottesville, Virgina.

But it gets even better. What if we were to act the Mad Scientist and cross a helicopter search engine with a hotel search engine that has a helicopter-ish name? Well, it would look something like this:

That’s right! You would get a flying hotel! Give yourself a pat on the back if you saw that coming. This is just the kind of excitement that you can expect to find when you venture into the land of alternative search engines. Finally, if you’re at all skeptical about the practicality of a combined helicopter + hotel, you can see it in action in this video: